Re: List of all functions (recursively) called by a function?

[Miles Bader]

Elena <egarrulo@gmail.com> writes:
>> There's been a huge variety of emacs-style editors which were much
>> faster than GNU emacs, and a huge number of Emacs-style editors written
>> in "nicer" (and faster) programming languages than elisp; very few
>> survive in any real sense.
>
> I'd bet those editors made the major mistake of not being a drop-in
> replacement for Emacs.  There is too much code written in Emacs Lisp
> to throw it away.

Sure, that's a huge factor these days.

Remember, though, that when GNU Emacs was first written, it needed to
win its audience while competing against many other versions of Emacs
(_everybody_ wrote a version of emacs in the '80s, following roughly the
model of the original Emacs); it was neither the first, nor originally
the most popular, and of course in the beginning, didn't have the
advantage of a large existing code-base (indeed, GNU Emacs originally
tried to some degree to offer compatibility with Gosling Emacs, which
was very popular).

Something about GNU Emacs' combination of relative portability (e.g.,
compared to its contemporary Hemlock, which was written in common-lisp,
and in many ways more sophisticated -- but probably not so portable),
relative programmer friendliness (sure elisp sucks, but compared to
mocklisp...), approachability, good press (it's from the author of the
original emacs!), "hacker friendly" attitude, and sheer dogheaded
persistence, ended up winning in the end, despite many other programs
having a head start...

-miles

-- 
"1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns"